DREAM AWAKE - HOW JAMES JOYCE INVENTED EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA & DISGUISED IT AS A BOOK

Tuesday, 13-October-2009-7:30pm
Delancey Street Theater
San Francisco Ca

curated and presented by Gerry Fialka
introduced by Merle Kessler
presented in association with Litquake

Paramedia-ecologist Gerry Fialka’s challenging interactive workshop probes how Joyce’s 1939 meta-narrative book/epic collage Finnegans Wake (and Marshall McLuhan’s Menippean satirized translation) presaged experimental and political activist cinema. How did the Wake influence Hollis Frampton, Owen Land, John Cage and Peter Greenaway? How and why does the Wake tell the history of everything that ever happened and will happen? Why did Joyce hang out with the Masons and reveal their secrets? Why did the British secret police study the Wake? How did the Wake invent MK-ULTRA, the CIA’s mind control program? How does the Wake write a detailed history of the future? How and why did Joyce anticipate the Facebook-Google-Wiki-Twitter-YouTube-blogospheric swirl and whatever comes after the Internet? Harry Smith, who claimed Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno invented cinema, stated that the function of film viewing is to put people to sleep -- dreaming awake. Presentation includes ultra-rare film clips from Mary Ellen Bute’s Passages from Finnegans Wake and Hollis Frampton’s Gloria! Re-Joyce interconnecting Finneganese “funny funereels,” “allnights newseryreel,” “they leap looply, looply, as they link to light,” “cellelleneteutoslavzendlatinsoundscript” and a “riot of blots and blurs and bars and balls and hoops and wriggles and juxtaposed jottings linked by spurts of speed.” Fun for all at Finnegans Wake.

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